A look at how other online rating systems have been rigged suggests you're being hopelessly naive.

Because all those bloggers critical of President Obama are being rounded up as we speak...

Russia has a reputation for jailing or even killing critics of Putin or his allies. The last president of the United States accused of that sort of activity against opponents ended up resigning before his inevitable impeachment and conviction. Even in the latest IRS scandal, which may or may not represent targeting of critics by someone in the executive branch, the end result has been quite the opposite to what one would find in Russia.

The US has no lack of problems, and people in positions of power will always tend towards abusing it. But all in all, it's probably the safest place in the world to speak one's opinion without fear of state persecution.

Socialism isn't a system, it's a class of systems. It encompasses everything from social democratic state on Scandinavia to Marxist-Leninist states.

Christ, it was one of the first lessons I learned that one could not simply sniff incoming packets and assume there was any order to them. People have been writing UDP protocols for decades now that require reassembly of packets into proper order.

I get that multipath TCP means a lot more traffic will be sent in odd fashion, but really, if the recipient TCP stack can grab and reorder them, then that's what counts.

I've set up networks where the server infrastructure itself is on its own segment, so there's no need for firewalls between the servers themselves, but the whole subnet is firewalled by a border router.

A lot depends on how tightly you can lock down a server. On my *nix boxes, I tend to only run daemons with listening ports to the extent absolutely necessary. I have a LAMP server that basically has ports 22, 80 and 443 open, and everything else either shut down or set to listen only on 127.0.0.1. Do I really need to configure iptables?

Worse, it was fucking boring. The Hobbit would have made a fine two hour movie, maybe two 1.5 hour movies. But there is not enough plot for seven and a half hours.

And by the time the last film is released, will be about 4.5 hours too long.

And what would you define something that didn't ingest, metabolize, excrete, reproduce and have some sort of system of heredity? Other chemical processes; like fire and crystallization, might hit some of these marks, but we don't call them living systems. So while the precise chemical processes, heck maybe even many of the chemical elements involved may be different (silicon-based life on Titan or something like that), I think at the end of the day if it going to be called life, it has to have the same basic features as terrestrial life.

If it's life, it's going to have a metabolism, it's going to reproduce and it's going to excrete. It may not, at first blush, look like life, but there will be chemical processes that in some way replicate processes found in terrestrial life.

I suspect they're not producing these kinds of phones simply because, despite the author's assertion, very few people actually do want such phones.

A writer and a submitter does not constitute some vast ignored market.

How much does a middle aged Slashdot ID go for nowadays? I might be in the market to sell mine to an astroturfer.

I'm not clear as to how, for instance, using buggy versions of SSL libraries fits into your whole theory. One possibility is that what you wrote is gibberish.

You could have saved some typing by not opening the article. But then you would not have been able to write this long pointless OT rant.

"Either your name is on the volume licensing agreement... or your brains."

As we speak, Microsoft is instructing its European "business partners" to give a certain French city a shitload of really cheap Office licenses.